News

The Rainforest Trust is supporting SCNL (BirdLife in Liberia) for the gazettement of the Gola Forest National Park which will be another cornerstone to the Greater Gola Landscape with the Gola Rainforest National Park in Sierra Leone. An anonymous supporter has offered to quadruple every donation to create the Gola Forest National Park. See https://www.rainforesttrust.org/project/gola/" target="_blank">here for more information.

From Newsweek's Tech & Sciences: "The forests in the West African countries of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia are such treasures of biodiversity that scientists don’t yet know nearly all the species that live there. Upon taking a closer look at frogs that live in and around waterfalls and fast-flowing river rapids, researchers found that what they thought was one species (Odontobatrachus natator) was in fact five separate ones, including four new to science". See the full scientific article here, to which we contributed!

The Gola Rainforest National Park's Research and Monitoring team finalised a report to long-term supporter Basel Zoo about the status of Pygmy Hippos inside and immediately around the GRNP. The distribution of Pygmy Hippo records showcases the importance of the Gola REDD Project since the latter focuses on the National Park as well as the 'leakage belt' (~4km outside the GRNP). The success of the Gola REDD Project will therefore greatly support the conservation of the Pygmy Hippo.

Our partners in Liberia for the GolaMA project (EU-funded) have discovered the very first signs of Pygmy Hippos in the project area! They also found the very first chimp nests there to. All very exciting news, so all our congratulations to the Society for the Conservation of Nature of Liberia (SCNL, BirdLife Liberia) and RSPB (BirdLife UK). The field site requires 9 hrs drive from Monrovia and crossing >30 bridges such as this one.

This summer one man will take on a challenge of a lifetime and cycle 781km and climbing 21,900 meters in seven days for Gola!

Cellan Michael works for RSPB and will take part in the Haute Route cycling challenge, and is aiming to raise £5,000.00 for the Gola Rainforest National Park which is jointly managed by the Conservation Society of Sierra Leone (BirdLife in Sierra Leone), the Government of Sierra Leone and the RSPB (BirdLife in the UK). The money will be match funded by Size of Wales, since Gola is one of the flagship projects for this charity which aims to conserve the equivalent of the size of Wales in tropical rainforest. Since 2010 Size of Wales has been working with RSPB to help protect the Gola Rainforest, and has contributed nearly £70,000 to its conservation.

The Haute Route is a prestigious seven-day road race, across Europe’s iconic cols such as Col d’Izoard, Col du Galibier and Col du Telegraphe . Cellan who cycles in his spare time says: “I’ve never done anything as challenging as this before. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity and although I’m nervous at the scale of the adventure, I’m also excited at the same time.”

Cycling 781km and climbing 21,900 metres in seven days, the Haute Route is regarded as one of the highest and toughest cyclosportives in the world. He adds: “This is a massive challenge, but I’m going to try and enjoy it. I’ve been in training since the start of the year and with the support of my family and friends I’m sure I’ll make it across the finish line in Geneva, and I might even get to see some great alpine wildlife too!”

Airborne imagery is a very powerful tool for decision making for protected area management. We have used this amazing technology to evaluate carbon storage, productivity and disturbance over a small section of the Gola forest and generated information on habitat structure that is being used in modelling the distribution of endangered wildlife. This work is the result of a partnership between GRNP, the University of Cambridge, RSPB and the University of Tor Vergata.

With the Ebola outbreak, the Research and Monitoring team of the Gola Rainforest National Park had to stop activities very suddenly last year and had no choice than to leave camera traps behind. The team has now resumed their work in full and retrieved some of these camera traps, despite some being stolen and others damaged beyond repair because of the humidity. When going through the imagery, we had this fantastic picture of a Pygmy Hipp within the National Park! An encouraging and positive note in the Ebola recovery context.

The Society for the Conservation of Nature of Liberia has a brand new website, www.scnlliberia.org. It includes a dedicated section on our collaborative efforts to conserve Liberia's share of the Gola Forest, funded by the European Union which you can find here.

The past year has been one of the most difficult years for the Gola team and the forest edge communities ever since the programme started. The Ebola outbreak has been responsible for over 10,000 deaths across West Africa, having huge longer term repercussions. However, 2 of the 3 Gola districts have been declared Ebola-free and the third has had no new cases in the last weeks, which is why we are now resuming our work in full. Everyone has attended extensive Health and Safety trainings and we shall be acting with great caution and keep monitoring any developments very carefully. Our first task will be to assess the longer term impacts of this crisis and sadly threats from unsustainable and unlawful activities are likely to increase as they offer short-term gains to desparate local communities. The threat for such practices is of particular concern and will require our full attention. 2015 promises to be a pivotal year for Gola and will also mark a 25th anniversary! In the meantime, our partners from Kew informed us that a species previously collected had now been identified as Sericanthe adamii (N.Hallé) Robbr (Rubiaceae), a very rare species which we believe to be the very first record for Sierra Leone!